Associate Professor McLachlan meets Dinesh Neupane his external co-supervised PhD student at the International Hypertension conference in Seoul. Both Associate Professor McLachlan and Dinesh supported the conference by submitting four poster presentations and abstracts.

The photo above is of of them standing together at one of their poster presentations.

Dinesh is working on an intervention study to understand the burden of hypertension in Nepal and improve blood pressure screening and monitoring. As part of his PhD program he is screening 3000 individuals in partnership with female health worker volunteers in Nepal and providing health promotion interventions around normal blood pressure targets and associated modifiable risk factors.

Examples of modifiable risk factors include increasing healthy eating and reducing salt, smoking and alcohol intake. The Rural Clinical School is very pleased it could be sponsored by the Australian-Korea Foundation to meet Dinesh and explore further research collaborations. Dinesh has expressed an interest to explore research postdoctoral training positions in Australia.

Mr Joel Katz from the media division of the Rural Clinical School did an audio interview with Dinesh and was impressed by the depth of his developed blood pressure intervention study in Nepal.

“I am very happy that the Australian-Korean Foundation has supported the Rural Clinical School’s visit to the International Hypertension conference in Seoul as well as potential for collaborations using Korea devices that have been showcased here,” Mr Neupane said.